


i had one thing to do (and i couldn't do it yet)

by cartographies



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: ...yet, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Not A Fix-It, Post-Episode: s04e13 No Better To Be Safe Than Sorry, Pre-Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 00:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19307359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies
Summary: “You said magic comes from pain. But I think. I thought. That magic might come from necessity.”





	i had one thing to do (and i couldn't do it yet)

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for discussion of canon-typical traumatic events, in this case suicide and sexual assault. 
> 
> Thanks to Gillian/knifetop for looking this over and cheerleading. You are the best of them all.

The day after the bonfire, Julia barges into Eliot’s room at the Cottage without asking and makes a gorgeous shower of sparks in the illness-heavy dim. Then she turns on the light and flings open the curtains, all while standing in the dead center of the room. 

“So I have magic back,” she pronounces. Eliot just blinks at her, and mostly from the sudden bright light flooding every corner of the room. He struggles to a sitting position, but can’t bring himself to do anything more than look at her in confusion. He’s on a lot of pain meds, and he doesn’t feel anything, right now—but he knows it comes in waves, and he also knows from the last time the levy gave, oh, two hours ago, that lying in wait under that nothingness is pure agony. He’s careful not to shake the foundations with any emotion at all, if he can help it, and Julia’s problem or surprise doesn’t seem worth it. 

Julia seems almost disappointed in his lack of reaction. What did she expect, a fucking parade? He feels bad about that thought when Julia says, sounding lost and devastated and panicked, “I was sitting there by the bonfire last night after the rest of you left and it just _happened_. How the fuck is that possible?”

“Magic comes from pain,” Eliot says, and starts to laugh, a bit hysterically. 

“What?” 

“Something Dead Fogg liked to say. Maybe not in so many words, but—from great suffering comes great power, etc etc. I guess you never got the speech.”

“No, I did,” Julia says, slowly. “When I was mindwiped—” ah, yes, Eliot remembered maybe hearing something about that in the friendly little ‘what we did while you were possessed’ catch ups that everyone, other than Margo, for some reason believed he was capable of giving a shit about, “—I was a student at Brakebills.”

“Well, then, there you go.” Flippant, because he doesn’t want to think of Julia sitting beside a dying fire and feeling a pain deep enough that it gives her back something lost and longed for.

“No, I don’t go.” He realizes that the tone of Julia’s _what_ was angry, not confused. “I—it was obvious that that was total bullshit. Even _Kimber D’Antoni_ realized that was total bullshit.”

“Bullshit. Right. Obviously.” His voice sounds odd to his own ears. He realizes that Julia is still dressed in the clothes she was wearing the night before. 

Julia covers her mouth with her hand, something about Eliot’s words hitting her. “Oh God, of course Quentin got that little speech and of fucking _course_ he took it to heart, he—” her face crumples, and she sits down on the end of Eliot’s bed with one accompanying, cut-off sob. 

“Fuck Dean Fogg, fuck Brakebills, fuck _me_ —”

Grief and pain and drugs are making his brain move very slowly, and maybe that’s why he’s not following whatever connection has Julia suddenly looking even more devastated than before, but he won’t pass up the chance to have someone tell him to go fuck himself, even if he isn’t totally clear on why.

“You can add me to the list. ‘Magic comes from pain’; that exact bit of phrasing—it’s mine.”

Julia looks at him and looks at him. Eliot gets a feeling that he’s had before, the few times he’s interacted with her—a sense of fathoms, depths. It hadn’t surprised Eliot a bit, when Quentin told them she’d become a goddess. 

She looks at him so long that he has no recourse but to say, “Come on, I know you have it in you, say: ‘Fuck you, Eliot.’ I’m not sure why exactly—”

But Julia is shaking her head, jerkily. She laughs a bit and says, “No, fuck, I came to—to tell you to tell me to fuck myself.”

Eliot blinks. He’s pretty sure it’s not only his own slowness at work in the fact it takes him a moment to make sense of that sentence. “Why?”

“Because you’re the only one that’s free of guilt here. So you get my confession. Sorry.”

That doesn’t seem right to Eliot. He woke up and everyone looks at him differently and everyone has been really cagey on details about the previous ten months. But Eliot isn’t stupid. He can put things together. He’s guilty of something, or his body is, and this time he’s pretty sure it isn’t just the vague but pervasive sense of guilt he carries around with him all the time and has pretty much since approximately the third grade. 

But Eliot has lost the plot. “I’m sorry—I’m afraid I don’t follow.” 

Julia seems to steel herself, looks away for a moment, before meeting his eyes again. “Do you know how Quentin died?”

Eliot feels a roar between his ears and a tingling sensation that starts in his fingertips and radiates up his arms and then across his whole body. This is the thing he can manage to think around for, he’s discovered, a maximum duration of about four hours. That’s what he had been doing when Julia came in—lying on his bed in the dark and letting his mind empty out. It was a slow and painstaking process, one he was still refining but was planning to continue to fine tune forever if necessary—but he’d found if he lay very still in the dark and pretended he didn’t have a body eventually he could lose hold on having a brain too. Before, ceaseless distraction had been his go-to, the only way he knew to keep suffering at bay. Now it proves inadequate, because even the bare requirements of the habitation of a body, like eating or walking the six feet to the bathroom or opening the door or showering or taking the pills that Margo guards and dispenses at set intervals reminds him unbearably that he is alive and that Quentin is not.

His mouth is dry, and he has to swallow several times before he can speak. “He cast in the Mirror World.”

The first whole day back in his own body he’d been so out of his mind with pain that he hadn’t thought to ask anything about anyone. He’d surface, and Margo was there holding his hand, and that was enough, her tremulous smile and wet eyes only what he’d demand from a dramatic sick-bed vigil. But eventually he’d asked where Quentin was.

The explanation had been surreal because it felt totally disconnected from anything else, in a way that made it hard to make sense of. The Monster part he’d understood, but he had only the barest idea of what the Mirror World was and why casting there killed you; he had no idea what the Seam was or who Everett was and why he wanted to become a god and why Quentin had to die to make sure it didn’t happen. But he could tell it wasn’t the whole story, could guess they were keeping things from him, and now he knows for sure from the way Julia isn’t looking at him.

“He didn’t—he didn’t have to cast,” Julia says. “He had—I’ve made Alice tell me this story, forty fucking times and she says that—he had time. He had time to throw the bottles in and he had time to run and he didn’t.”

Eliot opens his mouth. Not to say anything, actually, because his brain is a strange staticky whir, because he knows Quentin, he knows in his bones what that means and in a second he’s going to put the words to it and he’s going to—but Julia sees and grips his hand tight enough to hurt and rushes on, faster, like she knows if she stops speaking she probably won’t start again.

“No one wants to tell you because you nearly died and you aren’t...well. So it’s definitely shitty of me to put this on you, but I’m going to need you to help me, so you have to know. The Monster—I don’t need to tell you this, but he—”

“You do need to tell me.” Eliot has to interrupt. This, this unbearable thing he can handle, maybe. “I get the gist, murder and mayhem, but when I was in there, I didn’t see anything that was going on. I have no idea and no one will tell me. But since no one can look me in the eye—”

“That’s not why no one can look at you,” Julia says, soft. “But—alright. The Monster found you, and possessed you, or Fogg’s fucking alter ego of you—”

“I don’t remember.” Eliot knows that he was briefly someone named Nigel, but he has no memory of anything that happened outside his brain after being force-fed that memory wipe potion in Castle Blackspire.

Eliot must speak quietly enough that Julia can choose to ignore him. She’s looking away from him again. “Then he found Quentin. Or Quentin’s alter ego. Brian. And when the mindwipe was broken and everyone came back to themselves in Marina’s penthouse, both he and the Monster were covered in blood.”

Eliot tastes bile in the back of his throat. Here is what he’s been avoiding, and he wants to stop her but he knows he has to hear it as much as she has to say it.

“The Monster wanted—”

“Revenge,” Eliot interrupts, compelled to say something, to provide conversational breakers for the torrent that seems to want to spill out of Julia. He suppresses a shudder. Even after everything else, the vortex of rage and loss that he’d brushed up against while poking around the Monster’s subconscious was disturbing. “Against the gods who imprisoned him.” 

“Yeah,” Julia looks at him oddly. “See, I knew you got something when you were in there. From when you talked to Penny.” 

Eliot grimaces, shakes his head. “I only could access the stuff that he’d forgotten.” In that way, he guesses, he’d known the Monster better than it had known itself. 

“Well,” Julia says. “Yes. He wanted revenge. And he made Quentin help him. But it was more than that. The Monster was obsessed with him, Eliot. He’d been the one willing to stay in the Castle and take care of him, and Quentin was...good with him. Quentin was the only one who could talk to him like he wasn’t terrified of him. Quentin was soft with him. Patient. Until he told Quentin you were dead.” 

Julia is the first person who seems aware of the extent of Eliot’s devastation. Even Margo seems unprepared, if Eliot can judge by her odd silences, her speculative looks. But Julia can’t know the particular way this is gutting him, the memory of Quentin’s soft voice gentling a child back to sleep.

“Then we figured out a way to incapacitate the Monster. We were going to throw him back in Blackspire and Q was all in. I asked him if he understood that it meant that it’d be locking you in Blackspire forever, too, and he said you were dead. He believed you were dead. I wasn’t so sure. I know—I know gods lie. But I also know what damage gods can do. I wanted that thing gone. So we made a plan and—”

Eliot has been able to see where this is going, his paltry knowledge slotting into this narrative. He feels sick. “Then I broke through.” 

Julia says, “Yeah. I don’t know what you said to him, or, well, I do, and it didn’t make any sense but Quentin was suddenly 100% sure you were alive so I figured it must have been something only you could have known. And then he was determined to get you back.”

“You should have killed me anyway,” he bursts out. “You should have—”

He hears a panting kind of sob, and realizes it’s him. Julia takes his hand, gently this time, and says, “I wanted to.”

She gives him a weak smile. “He wanted us to help the Monster build a body so we could get him out of yours. I thought that seemed like a really bad idea—like, apocalyptically bad. When it came down to saving you or unleashing that thing on the world but possibly with a body infinitely more powerful, I thought the right choice seemed clear. But it’s different, when you—care about someone. I barely know you, Eliot, but Quentin—he would have done _anything_ , to save you. I knew nothing I could say was going to stop him or change his mind, and I couldn’t leave him alone with it. He was all in, so I was all in. It was all hypothetical anyway. We’d lost our one shot to somehow how contain him, and we didn’t have a Plan B. I thought it couldn’t get any worse.”

She laughs, bitter. She looks down at their hands, still entwined. 

“After you broke through, there was...leakage. It seemed like _you_ were bleeding through. Or your desires were. He developed a taste for tequila. And cocaine. And the entirety of Marina’s considerable stash of pharmaceuticals.” 

Julia pauses then, seeming hesitant to go on for the first time since she hit her rhythm. Considering she has without any hint of embarrassment laid out Eliot’s screamingly obvious history of substance abuse, he knows it’s going to be bad. 

But Julia just looks at him, mouth drawn, eyes huge. Opens her mouth, seems to reconsider something, closes it. Pauses. “Anyway, the Monster had your body as a hostage. He threatened to walk it into traffic or take it on a bender if we didn’t comply with his demands. It was a pretty effective bargaining tool, when it came to getting Quentin to do what he wanted. And this went on. For months. He killed innocent people and he made Quentin help him dispose of the corpses and we never got any closer to saving you and it _broke_ him, Eliot.” 

Free of guilt, what a fucking joke. Eliot’s body, its teeming unbounded want, has made him guilty for as long as he can remember. 

It’s _desires_. That white space created by what Julia has said, and a sense of what she is still unwilling to say. 

“Broke him,” he echoes, and he can hear the anguish in his own voice when he chokes, “Julia, what did I _do_.”

She shakes her head, looks at him with her shining pitying eyes, says, “Eliot, it wasn’t you, it was the—” 

“No, what did _I_ do, you said my—desires bled through that the Monster was—did he—” 

Julia is bright and sensitive and has more than her fair share of experience with godly violation, but Eliot's stomach roils with how quickly she picks up exactly what he can’t bring himself to say. What it says about what she had been witness too, and what story she’d read into what she’d seen.

“No, it’s just—he started getting a bit...” Julia winces a bit, looking for the right words, “...handsy. He started touching Quentin, a lot, and like—like he was you. A hand on his shoulder, or...” 

Casual affection, touches bestowed without thinking, as easy as breathing. That constant overflowing desire to be touching Quentin in whatever way he could, granted permission as long is it remained safe within a certain defined boundary. Taken, turned sour, corrosive. 

His dread winds tighter, because it’s obvious that Julia has come up against the limits of what she’s willing to share.

“Or what, Julia?” 

“That’s it, Eliot, whatever you’re thinking—it’s not like that. That’s not what ground him down. Or—it was, but it was the fact that it reminded him of you and he wanted to save you so badly and he felt like he was failing.”

“That you know of—it wasn’t like that, that you saw.”

“We were pretty close, these last few months. I didn’t let him out of my sight often. Because. What I’m trying to say is—I knew it was bad, that he wasn’t doing well, and I didn’t do anything and he—”

“You think he killed himself.” He stumbles on the words, in his rush to get out ahead of Julia. He thinks it’s better, if he says it, somehow. It would be unbearable to have to hear it. He can see why everyone has been avoiding talking to him, if this is what they have to talk around. He almost appreciates a wisdom or kindness in Julia’s approach—for giving him the clues but then letting him do the work, leading him gently by the hand but then letting him take the final plunge. Almost, except it’s still unbearable. It’s unbearable. 

Julia takes a few deep breaths and says, “Yeah, I do. The thing is—from about the age of 12 on I designated myself the role of ‘person who takes care of Quentin Coldwater.’ His mom is kind of terrible, honestly. His dad—his dad loved him and he tried hard but—he failed him, in a lot of ways. So I thought it was up to me. Jesus. Not that I knew anything. Not that I did a great job. But we got through high school. Then undergrad. Then—fuck, fuck, _fuck_.”

He can maybe guess what she’s thinking of, what’s hit her with a familiar force of self-loathing—the Scarlatti Web, Quentin trapped in his own mind. Eliot knows about everything she’s saying, actually, if from the other side. It hits him, suddenly, how Julia is almost a stranger to him but yet he knows so _much_ about her, stuff that would probably mortify her—dreams, jokes, cruelties, kindnesses—stuff that there’s no way she could know about him, because Eliot only learned via the intimacy of being the sole witness to a man trying desperately to conjure her precisely enough that she wouldn’t fade, even in the face of a distance of decades. 

Julia shakes herself out of it. Goes steadily on, blithely skipping over the two years of non-stop trauma that he knows had left her a sobbing wreck on her own couch. “I always tried. I always tried to talk to him, even if I had no fucking clue what would help. But this time—it was so big, it felt so hopeless, I didn’t even know where to begin—”

“What could you have done? Made him take a timeout from saving--saving the world to go to therapy?” He doesn’t know why he wants to exculpate Julia so badly. He should be angry at her, at everyone. But if he gets angry at all, he might get angry at Quentin, and he doesn’t want to do that. It’s safer to stick to being angry at himself.

“I could have done _something_.” He can see Julia is on the same infernal hamster wheel of self-recrimination that he is.

“Well—from my point of view you aren’t at fault. You don’t have to ask for my forgiveness. I was the one who did a stupid thing and got possessed and an evil entity wearing me as a suit tormented Quentin for months—”

He breaks off. He can’t think about that. He goes on. “I could have done something before that, too. Did you know—when he got into Brakebills, Dean Fogg told him to go off his meds? That he wouldn’t need them anymore. I, um, he told me that during the Quest. So we were kind of busy, and I didn’t say anything.”

Quentin had told him at the mosaic. Eliot had had fifty years of dealing with the enemy parts of Quentin’s brain, in a world without either therapy or modern medicine. It hadn’t been easy. But Eliot—Eliot hadn’t done such a bad job, had he? Quentin had outlived him. Quentin had lived to old, old age. Then again, they’d lived a life with nothing like the hellish circumstances he had been living in, his last months. It was like Eliot had always feared. He wasn’t made to Quentin’s partner in their real lives. That was bullshit, and he knew it now. He’d run away. He hadn’t even tried. 

“OK, great,” Julia says, “Glad we’ve got that settled. Neither of us are going to let the other torment ourselves with what-ifs. Now we can get to what I came here for. We’re going to get him back.”

Julia looks at him like she might have looked at petitioners she’d granted miracles to, if she’d been a goddess long enough to do that shit. Like she expects gratitude, or at least shock. For Eliot to say, _what?? But how…?_

Because he’s a bastard, he says, “Quentin’s dead, Julia.”

“Yeah, so was Alice. We’ve done the impossible. There wasn’t a body, Eliot. We don’t know how the Mirror World works. We owe it to Quentin to at least give it a fucking shot.” 

“I was dead too, and look how that turned out. You said it yourself. You should have let me fucking die.” Eliot doesn’t know why he’s saying this, why he’s nearly snarling, ugly as he’s ever been. He does know. He has to stamp down the leap of hope he felt at the conviction in Julia’s voice when she said they would get him back.

Julia isn’t having it. “Yeah, Quentin fucking died to get you back, asshole. You’re going to tell me you’re just going to let that stand?”

He would protest that other people might die, might pay the price like the bodies Quentin oversaw the disposal of. They’d both know it was bullshit posturing. 

Eliot looks down at his hands, hands that have committed bloody horrors, hands that tormented Quentin with a perversion of Eliot’s uncontainable affection. The fight has gone out him. He almost whispers, “I don’t think I could stand it. If we failed.”

When he looks back up at her, Julia seems lost in thought. When she speaks she doesn’t seem to respond to what he’s said. “You said magic comes from pain. But I think. I _thought_. That magic might come from _necessity_.”

“I don’t know how much you know, about me not getting into Brakebills. I remember you were there when me and Quentin argued outside that safe house, so maybe you talked about it, I don’t know—but obviously I didn’t get in and I couldn’t let it go. I was _unhinged_ , trawling Google, looking for any way to get that feeling of _specialness_ back. But I couldn’t make anything more than a few sparks. Party tricks. Then Quentin showed up to my birthday party—fuck, you were there for that too, weren’t you?—and I showed him and he looked at me with pity and told me that that was nothing, and he was right. And then I went into the bathroom and some hedge sleazebag took off my shirt with magic and then used magic to tie me to a radiator and I thought I was about to get assaulted in a gross dive bar bathroom and I suddenly I could make fire shoot from my fingertips. So it was need. It was necessity, it was wanting to live. I needed it, and it came. But then I was raped, in the _blood of my friends_ , who had just been _murdered_ in front of me and I—it didn’t. I wanted to live _so badly_ and it didn’t fucking matter, because I was up against a _god_ , but still, I guess that puts paid to my theory. But it also makes yours useless, because I was in a lot of pain, and I wasn’t any more powerful than I was before. So. But what I’m saying, Eliot, is that it doesn’t matter, it’s not a fucking theory, much less a law it’s…” Julia trails off, mouth working, then goes on, softly—

“I think it’s just…a story. Whatever you tell yourself. A kind of—fable. A tale. The kind you tell kids so they can make sense of things. But we’re the children, and we’re telling it ourselves. No one has any fucking clue, which means we can make it up as we go along. So, necessity sounds good enough for me, because I need—I need Quentin, and I need to fix it, and I need to not fail him again, so it has to be good enough, and I am fucking sick of my entire life feeling like—a sadistic moral lesson from some unseen power,” Julia spits. “I get magic, get told I’m special—and then I’m told I’m not special enough. I get magic, and I lose. I lose my best friend. I get magic when no one else has it, and it comes from my fucking _rapist_. I become a goddess, but I have to leave everyone I love behind. When I can’t fucking do that, I lose magic. My best friend is _dead_ and I get magic back. But whatever twisted fuck is up there has got it wrong, because I refuse to take instruction anymore. They’re pretty dim, they haven’t been paying attention, it’s not going to fucking take, because I gave up magic for Quentin once and I _would do it again_.”

Eliot finds it interesting, the way Julia conflates magic with her _entire life_ in this little speech. 

“So, what—you think that there’s some kind of machine, somewhere, and we can put your magic in one slot and Q will come out of the other?” Eliot tries to smile at her, sort of succeeds, and he’s aiming for gentle, but he thinks it might come out patronizing, because Julia says, sharp—

“No, I _think_ that Quentin and I have been to the Underworld and _come back out again_ and there has to be a way, we have to at least _try_ —” but Julia doesn’t finish because she’s started to cry. 

Eliot reaches forward and pulls Julia into a hug, as always letting touch do what words can’t. He wonders what lesson he’s supposed to take from his life. Where he starts this is one consideration. He would maybe have started at finding out he had magic, like Julia, but well, he’s just had a lot of time in his own brain telling him what a false proposition that is. _Magic comes from pain_ had been a comforting mantra to him. He had grown up sitting in a hard church pew every Sunday hearing about divine punishment and eternal reward. Then, Brakebills. Eliot had suffered, he had caused suffering, but it had all been redeemed. It had been worth something, maybe. He hadn’t ever quite managed to believe it. But it’s a nice thought. He’d given it to Quentin as a gift, in the hopes he could get something from it. The memory of that day niggles at him, there’s something—

“I was the one who told Quentin magic comes from pain,” he says into Julia’s hair. “But that wasn’t the important part of that conversation. Not to me. I also told him—I told him he wasn’t alone.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to be fix-it fic! That still might happen. But I had to like, take to task The Magicians 4.13 entire thematic framework first, and this is the ham-fisted form it took. No happy ending yet, but I found it very therapeutic.
> 
> I am on tumblr [here](https://honeybabydichotomy.tumblr.com/).


End file.
